Jam

How to spell jam

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jam

What does jam mean?

1. nounA sweet spread made by boiling fruit with sugar until it thickens.
2. verbTo squeeze, cram, or wedge something tightly into a space.
3. nounA crowded blockage or an awkward, difficult situation.

Jam in a sentence

• noun

  She spread strawberry jam thickly on her warm toast.

• verb

  He tried to jam all his clothes into one small suitcase.

• noun

  The motorway accident caused a three hour traffic jam.

• noun

  The farm shop sells homemade jam in small glass jars.

• verb

  Too many sheets at once can jam the office printer.

• noun

  Missing the deadline left the whole team in a real jam.

Where does jam come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origin of jam is genuinely uncertain, and most dictionaries treat it as a word that simply appeared in English in the early 1700s without a clear ancestor. The leading theory is that it is imitative in nature, echoing the verb jam meaning to press, squeeze, or cram things tightly together, so the fruit preserve may be named for the way the fruit is crushed and pressed down during cooking. The verb sense of pressing or wedging is recorded slightly earlier and may itself be a variant of the dialect word champ, meaning to bite down or crush noisily. Over time the squeezing sense produced many everyday uses, including a crowd of people jammed together and a traffic jam where vehicles are pressed to a halt. The musical sense, as in a jam session, grew up in twentieth century jazz culture. Note that jam keeps a plain spelling and should not be confused with its homophone jamb, the side post of a doorway, which carries a silent b from the French jambe meaning leg.

How the word is built

• jam (single root, no prefix or suffix)